Trends in Data Analytics: Looking back on a decade of growth

Stacy Gordon

Apr 26, 2016

Apr 26, 2016 | Stacy Gordon

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If you follow our blog and keep up on LatentView news, you know that we’re excited to be celebrating our 10th anniversary this month. This is the 2nd post of our 3 part blog series on how the analytics industry has evolved. In our previous post, we shared some details on LatentView’s creation and how far we’ve come over the course of a decade. Look out for our 3rd article on future trends. Now we’d like to take a broader look back at trends in data analytics over the past ten years and examine some of the industries that are benefitting from growth in the space.

Emerging Analytics

Back in 2006, analytics use was still an emerging concept. For most early adopter companies, the focus was on deriving value from existing internal company data and using that data to glean insight and improve resource usage, productivity, etc. Companies were interested in looking inwards and getting smarter about using the data they already collected. The conversations we have today about unstructured data and external data didn’t exist – it was all about getting smarter with using what was already on hand internally.

Even back then, marketing departments were leading the way with analytics usage. In fact, many of the questions they attempted to answer are still top of mind today: how do we acquire new customers? How do we retain customers? How do we promote business growth? In essence, the primary goals, concepts and usage of analytics haven’t changed over the past decade. What has changed is the amount of data available, the kind of data and analysis opportunities available and the diversity of data sources. Additionally, since 2006 the business world in general has developed a far more data-centric culture. Much has changed from the standpoint of organizational culture and structure as well as the general availability of talent. In 2006, few companies focused on recruiting data scientists; today demand is high and it’s become one of the more difficult positions to fill. Today’s companies are equipped with both the data and the talent to glean far more insight and use that insight intelligently.

Continued Evolution

Over the past three years the landscape has seen its biggest changes of the decade. Namely, analytics has gone mainstream. Industrial businesses – the likes of which never considered analytics ten years ago – have started adopting the tools. The early adopters in 2006 were consumer and services focused businesses. Even the newer age, digital focused businesses – the Twitters, Facebooks, Teslas of the world – are considered early analytics adopters. More recently, traditional, large scale businesses have started to think about analytics in a big way and use it to advance business options. Today, mainstream businesses like manufacturing and oil and gas companies are utilizing these tools in ways never considered before. These trends in data analytics have delivered a better understanding of data, enabling these companies to open up new revenue streams. Essentially, the information analytics has helped uncover has allowed these businesses to sell more than just products, but services as well. For example, imagine a manufacturer selling a scanning machine to a hospital. In today’s data and analytics market, the business transaction is no longer limited to selling the machine and walking away. Companies now have the ability to capture all kinds of data on usage and send it back to the manufacturer. This data then enables the manufacturer to predict machine failures and sell in annual maintenance contracts – a benefit for both the hospital, which reduces machine downtime, and the manufacturer, which ensures a steady revenue stream.

The benefits of today’s data and analytics tools extend beyond big ticket items. Another great example of how data collection can affect an industry as a whole comes from mobile phones. Mobile providers encourage their users to set up user IDs and profiles that enable them to gather great reams of user data. Using that data, providers and manufacturers can better understand usage to improve the next generation of an item and entice a user to upgrade products. They can also develop additional, complementary products to sell based on what they learn about usage. The automotive industry is another area that benefits from analytics advancements. Most new cars today essentially have on-board computers that collect massive amounts of data on drivers and how they use their cars. This data can tell manufacturers if there’s been an accident, how much freight trucks are hauling and much more, giving them more insight into product usage than ever before.

Data capture and analytics usage certainly have come a long way in ten years, and it’s interesting to look back on how trends in data analytics have affected the marketplace. As the Internet of Things expands further and our world becomes even more connected, we’ll see this space continue to evolve. Keep an eye on our blog for the final post in this mini-series: a look at what the future of analytics holds.

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TOPIC DEFINITIONS - g2crowd.com

Pricing: This theme captures what the user thinks on the pricing of the product, the frequency of paid updates, affordability of the product, worthiness in terms of the features offered and comparison with competitor pricing.Sample keywords: Reasonable pricing, value for what it costs, inexpensive, cost-effective, etc.

Accessibility: This includes the users’ feeling of how easy or difficult it is to access QuickBooks from any place or from multiple devices as it is cloud based.Sample keywords: Can be used anywhere at any time, easily accessible, etc.

User-friendly: This theme relates to the easiness in usage of the product and its features, whether the support documents help in making the product user friendly, whether there are any tutorials provided by Intuit in making the users comfortable in working with the product, the simplicity of setting up or installing the product, user interface reviews, new user experiences with the product usage, navigability within the software all feature under this theme.Sample keywords: Easy to use, simple, simplicity, user-friendly, etc.

Multiuser Ability: It covers conversations relating to any access restrictions or clarity of usage in the software in case of a multi-user environment, the problems on switching between single and multi-user modes and whether the transfer of User License facility is available or not.Sample keywords: Ability to have multiple users, ability to collaborate, etc.

Banking Feeds: This encompasses the integration of bank accounts with QuickBooks Online and feasibility of the same in terms of sync time, transaction rate, live feeds, etc.Sample keywords: Banking, deposits to bank, bank account, etc.

Customer Support: This predominantly deals with the kind of customer interaction they have. It could be simple appreciation or complaints regarding inexperienced staff who could not answer issues, the long hold times, language barriers, unethical practices of forcing the customer to upgrade to a newer version for having the ability to continue using their existing features, etc.Sample keywords: Online training, customer service, served us well, etc.

Reporting: Ease of creating, modifying and customising reports and comparison of reporting options with that of its competitors will be highlighted here.Sample keywords: Detailed reporting, relevant reports, reporting capabilities, etc.

Invoicing: Facilities with respect to creation and publishing of invoices within QuickBooks and among the competitors, batch invoicing capability and sharing the invoices through Email are topic that will fall under this theme.Sample keywords: Invoice management, invoicing, invoice number, billing history, etc.

Accounting: How good and error free is QuickBooks with respect to inventory management, income & expense tracking, tax calculation compatibilities across different states of the US and across different countries.Sample keywords: expense tracking, tax calculation, bookkeeping, accounting, etc.

Integration: Integration of the QuickBooks software with other software for additional capabilities, performance of credit card and payroll integrations and the efficiency of QuickBooks Sync Manager are captured under this theme.Sample keywords: Sync with QuickBooks, integrate with software databases, etc.

Performance: The few topics discussed here would be - Is the performance fast? Is it subjected to frequent hangs or crashes? Does the data get corrupted upon migration from one version to another?Sample keywords: Accurate, helpful, fast, slow in operation, time-consuming, etc.

Payroll Services: Efficiency of the payroll service, complaints of issues while transferring the payroll to the employees like loss the transfer in between, etc. fall into this category.Sample keywords: payroll feature, employee payroll, payroll services, etc.

Forced Upgrade: Unsatisfied with the forced upgrade for no reason, upgrades involving a higher pricing structure, features being disabled with older versions are few concerns that fall under this category.Sample keywords: Forced to upgrade, not compatible, update software, recent version, etc.

Transaction Processing Issues: Payment outage, complaints of frequent service down, processor failure, payment transfer failure from customer to users, etc., are considered in this section.Sample keywords: Payment, transaction issues, invoice, not able to receive money, etc.

Issues in downloads: Problems in downloading transactions or on the downloaded transactions will be covered in this topic.Sample keywords: Unable to download/encrypt/restore data, incorrect format, etc.

Holds money, account, and documents: Accusations of Intuit trying to unnecessarily hold users’ money, accounts, and documents are the major issues in this heading.Sample keywords: Hold back funds, unusual activity, high credit card bills, etc.

Migration Issues: Migration from desktop to online and the subsequent issues like the positives of desktop version being overshadowed will be mentioned here.Sample keywords: Sync problems, invoice issues, unfriendly, old version not supported, etc.

QBO vs Competitors - Ratings Comparison

Observation: Here, we observed that QBO has the lowest average rating score and the highest proportion of 2 & 1 star ratings.

Procedure: For this analysis, close competitors of QuickBooks Online product such as Xero, FreshBooks, Sage and Wave was considered and the ratings given for these products by the reviewers of g2crowd.com were normalised. They were then classified into three buckets - ‘positive’ if they had a 5 or 4 star, ‘neutral’ if they had a 3 star and ‘negative’ if they were rated 2 or below.

Representation: The color-coding for positive as green, neutral as yellow and negative as red is also reflective of the overall sentiment of the product with respect to its competitors.

Benchmarking with Competitors

Observation: The data obtained was the analysed to see where these products were predominantly being used. It can be observed that QuickBooks Desktop was being used widely in the Accounting vertical, QuickBooks Online being used in Accounting and Marketing verticals almost equally, Xero and Sage were used the most in Information Technology & Services while FreshBooks and Sage were being preferred in the Marketing & Advertising vertical. Also, while ‘Small Merchants, prefer QuickBooks Online over the rest, the product that gained momentum in the ‘Mid-Market’ and ‘Enterprise’ categories was Sage.

Furthermore, since QuickBooks Online product was aimed at catering to the accounting needs of small and medium businesses, dislikes and negative sentiment associated with the product is a major concern for Intuit.

Procedure: QuickBooks Online product was compared with QuickBooks Desktop, Xero, FreshBooks, Sage and Wave for the ratings, usage of the products across different industry verticals and company sizes. The reviews from g2crowd.com were scrapped using Python, along with the details of the reviewer such as role, experience, industry information, size of company and, likes and dislikes for the product. G2crowd.com identified the industry verticals and classified the size of the company based on the user information provided on their respective LinkedIn accounts.

Representation:

The ratings were on a scale of 1-5. The intensity of the green colour represents the rating given with dark green being 5 and light green being 1.

The length of the bar in the graphs under the industry heading is indicative of the number of users for the product belonging to the respective verticals mentioned on the y-axis.

The pie-chart represents the ratio of users for the products where ‘blue’ represents small businesses, ‘orange’ represents mid-market businesses, ‘grey’ represents large enterprises and ‘yellow’ indicates the unavailability of this detail for certain users.

User Perceptions on Different Features of the Product

Observation: It was observed that the users associate positive sentiment features such as Accessibility and Multi-user Ability, etc., and negative sentiment towards Customer Support and Security Issues. User-Friendliness (associated with negative sentiment) of the product and Accessibility (associated with positive sentiment) are the two topics being widely mentioned with respect to QuickBooks Online.

Procedure: To understand how the users perceive the different features of the product, conversation data was scrapped from g2crowd.com. There were around 120 reviews specific to QuickBooks Online. The reviews were then assigned a polarity score based on set of key sentiment words and the combination of their occurrences in the conversation. Themes bringing out the perceptions on the different features of the product were listed and the conversations were flagged under all the relevant themes they were reflecting.

Representation: The ‘red’ colour indicates negative sentiment while ‘green’ indicates positive. The intensity of the colour is indicative of the intensity of the sentiment (with dark shade representing high intensity). The size of the bubble is indicative of the number of conversations for that topic.

Analysis from Consumeraffairs.com

Observation: Reflective of the inference from the analysis of conversations in g2crowd.com, here again customer service and fraudulent acts are the key areas of concern for the users.

Procedure: To identify the complaint areas for QuickBooks Online product, around 117 reviews were downloaded from consumeraffairs.com, a website where the users expressed their concerns more than accolades. The topics of concern were identified and the reviews were categorised accordingly.

Representation: The size of the bubbles in the graph is representative of the volume of the conversations belonging to that particular theme. The greater the size of the bubble, greater is the expression of concern for that topic.

Comparison with QuickBooks Desktop

Observations: Although, online version of the product has better accessibility, multi-user ability and security features, It can be seen that users prefer desktop version to the online version in terms of performance on dimensions like reporting, accounting, invoicing and payroll services. Customer support, pricing, updates and search option are areas associated with negative sentiment for both the versions which should be a major concern for Intuit.

Procedure: In order to migrate users from Desktop to Online version of the product, it is necessary to understand how the users perceive the features offered by the desktop version in comparison to what is being offered by the online version. Therefore, a similar analysis was performed were conversations regarding QuickBooks Desktop were scrapped, assigned polarity score and classified under the different themes indicative of the features they were highlighting. The results were then compared with user perception for QuickBooks Online.

Representation:

The user perception towards different features of Desktop and Online version were viewed alongside each other using a butterfly graph representation. The length of the bar is indicative of the topic affinity for the product (given as a percentage of conversations) and the colour of the bar indicates the sentiment with respect to that feature for each product individually, with ‘red’ colour being negative and ‘green’ colour being positive. Here again, the intensity of the colour represents the intensity of the sentiment (with dark shade representing high intensity).

A simple bubble chart was also plotted where size of the bubble represented the combined topic affinity and the distance of the bubble from the logo indicated how each theme was being fascinated by the users.